Diane Greene, who helped co-founding virtualization giant VMware in 1998 and served as the company’s CEO for the next decade, has joined Google’s board of directors. Greene has been selected to fill the 10^th and last open seat on the search giant’s board, which has been empty ever  since Arthur Levinson left in 2009. There was probably no apparent  lack of candidates, but Greene’s experience managed to outshine that of the competition.

She played a key role in EMC’s acquisition of VMware, and has a long track record of successfully handling situations that require strong management. That list of achievements extends beyond her tenure at the company she founded to the positions she held at VXtreme, where she also served as chief executive, and Intuit, in addition to a number of other tech firms.

“Diane is a special person who combines a sharp business acumen with a brilliant technical mind,”  said Eric Schmidt, who shifted to the role of executive chairman at Google after co-founder Larry Page reclaimed the CEO role in April.”We know she will be a great contributor and we are grateful to have her insight.”

The technical element in Greene’s portfolio covers a great deal of what Google is up to today. That includes enterprise software, one of the areas where the company is seeing the most competition, and servers. Similarly to Facebook it also has a lot of silicon to manage in order to power its infrastructure, and efficiency is a big emphasis on such a large scale.

Google and the social networking giant have more than one thing in common. Ever since Google+, the former has also been subject to a very impressive amount of outcry over alleged privacy violations. The latest update also attracted critics’ attention, this time from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.